The Scoop
In January, The Wall Street Journal made an explosive claim: Quoting “intelligence reports,” the paper reported that not only had 12 members of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, taken part in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, but 10% of the relief agency’s 12,000 workers in Gaza had ties to militant groups.
The New York Times on Jan. 28 had published a detailed story about 12 workers who aided in the Oct. 7 attacks, followed by the Journal’s broader piece about UNRWA staff’s alleged links to Hamas — a one-two punch that had an immediate impact on the agency. More than a dozen countries including Germany and Britain froze funding to UNRWA, stalling a total of $450 million. It was a massive scandal that put the organization, the main conduit for aid to Gaza, on the defensive.
But months later, the paper’s top editor overseeing standards privately made an admission: The paper didn’t know — and still doesn’t know —whether the allegation, based on Israeli intelligence reports, was true.
“The fact that the Israeli claims haven’t been backed up by solid evidence doesn’t mean our reporting was inaccurate or misleading, that we have walked it back or that there is a correctable error here,” Elena Cherney, the chief news editor, wrote in an email earlier this year seen by Semafor.
That one of the paper’s biggest and most impactful stories about the war was based on information it could not verify is a startling acknowledgement, and calls into question the validity of the claims as reported in the Journal. The piece had major reverberations internally and raised serious concerns among some staff. According to three people familiar with the situation, since the story was published earlier this year, reporters have tried and failed to corroborate the 10% claim at the center of the story. Journalists working on the Middle East coverage for the Journal have also since raised concerns about elements of the paper’s coverage of the war more broadly that some feel tip too heavily toward Israel.
“Our coverage of UNRWA is part of a long reporting effort on the war in Gaza that involves staffers across the newsroom,” a Journal spokesperson told Semafor. “Trying to get more information is what good reporters do, and we have the best in the business. We’ve reported on this topic thoroughly and comprehensively. We stand by our January story on Israel’s 10% claim, and we stand by the many stories that have followed.”
In this article:
Know More
At various points since Oct. 7, there have been internal tensions and friction within the Journal over the paper’s coverage of the conflict in Gaza. Semafor reported last year that before the Journal published a story that Iran “helped plan” last week’s attack by Hamas, veteran staffers on the national security team at the paper raised concerns about the story, saying that they wanted more time to directly confirm the string of allegations reported by several of the paper’s correspondents based in the Middle East. The story was published over those objections, and remains unconfirmed by other major American media outlets.
Semafor spoke with three current and former staff at the Journal who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
Reporters covering Gaza in the Middle East bureau were concerned about deputy Middle East bureau chief Shayndi Raice’s leadership and privately discussed asking editors to remove her from leading coverage. Staff also raised concerns about Carrie Keller-Lynn, a freelancer tapped to cover the war for the Journal and one of the reporters bylined on the UNRWA story, who had liked a series of social media posts mocking Palestinians.
There were also broader concerns about the paper’s coverage of the war. In a telephone call with Middle East staff in December, then-standards editor Richard Boudreaux said the paper had examined a sample of its coverage over several weeks and found that it leaned too heavily on Israeli voices and did not include enough Arab perspectives or expert sources. According to one person familiar with the move, the paper subsequently created a master list with dozens of sources to address the imbalance.
But the internal friction within the Journal came to a head over the paper’s coverage of UNRWA.
In January, just days after the Times story, the Journal published a followup highlighting the stat that more than 1,000 of the agency’s workers were directly linked to Hamas and other militant groups.
“At least 12 employees of the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency had connections to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and around 10% of all of its Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, according to intelligence reports reviewed by The Wall Street Journal,” the lead of the story read.
The reporters, Keller-Lynn and David Luhnow, noted that they had been briefed on the underlying intelligence. But the story didn’t provide any details about the hundreds of alleged Hamas affiliates working at UNRWA , prompting questions from readers and pro-Palestinian critics, who demanded more evidence.
Inside the Journal, some were wondering the same thing. After the story was published in January, other journalists failed to confirm its central claim. According to two people familiar with the reporting, the Journal’s Israeli intelligence sources had not provided a verifiable list of names of UNRWA workers alleged to have ties to Hamas that the paper could follow up on.
One investigative journalist for the Journal in Washington at one point tried to verify UNRWA staffers’ Hamas affiliations through cell phone data, but was unsuccessful. So did national security beat reporters Nancy Youssef and Jared Malsin, who found that US intelligence also could not substantiate that part of the claim, and they filed a story in late February noting some of the gaps. But according to two sources with knowledge of the situation, the reporters were not pleased when the story was initially published with the headline: “U.S. Finds Claims That U.N. Aid Agency Staff Took Part in Hamas Attack ‘Credible.’” After internal complaints, the paper later updated the headline to reflect the ambiguity: “U.S. Finds Some Israeli Claims on U.N. Staff Likely, Others Not.”
In recent months, external groups have also applied pressure to the Journal to alter or correct parts of the story. Earlier this year, Haroon Mokhtarzada, the founder of Rocket Money, saw the Journal story and some of the backlash to the piece among pro-Palestinian media. Mokhtarzada had no professional stake in the conflict, but had become increasingly interested in the plight of the news media and its role in shaping US foreign policy. (Last year, he helped former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan raise money to start his new publication Zeteo.)
He used his business contacts to connect with Cherney and presented her with a 50-page memo calling into question the Journal’s reporting on Unrwa.
The paper was unmoved.
In an email to Mokhtarzada in April, Cherney said that she spoke with the paper’s world coverage chief and the mideast bureau chief about the Journal’s reporting on UNRWA, and asked the editor responsible for corrections to take an independent look at stories about the agency. But she said ultimately the paper stood by its stories, noting that it “reported that UNRWA questioned how Israel came up with such a broad number,” and that while US intelligence said it couldn’t verify Israel’s allegation, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Israel’s UNRWA claims ‘highly, highly credible.’”
“In our review, we found that our reporting has consistently made clear that these allegations were made by Israeli intelligence; and that we gave UNRWA and UN officials ample opportunities to comment and to push back on the Israeli allegations,” she said in an email to him.
Max’s view
The Journal isn’t alone in facing scrutiny over its reporting on the war in Gaza, which has proved deeply divisive within many US newsrooms.
The New York Times has had its own raft of issues. The Intercept, an unabashedly pro-Palestinian digital media outlet, reported on internal fissures within the Times over its coverage of the war, which slowed down the publication of a piece in flagship podcast The Daily.
The publication has also faced issues similar to the ones at the Journal: One of the reporters on its controversial story about sexual violence had previously liked offensive tweets critical of Palestinians. Early in the war, the paper offered a rare apology for its coverage of an explosion at a Gaza hospital, noting that it relied too heavily on unsubstantiated claims from Hamas. The paper has essentially resorted to operating a split newsroom, with one side covering from the Palestinian perspective and the other covering from the Israeli one.
Conversely, allies of Israel have pushed to have journalists at major publications taken off the beat who they see as as too aggressively pro-Palestinian. I reported earlier this year on how pro-Israel groups were putting together opposition-style research on reporters at the Washington Post, digging up pro-Palestinian tweets and pointing out alleged biases and mistakes. The Post has offered only a mild defense of its own reporters covering the war.
As Semafor Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith and I have previously written, these stories are a deeply complicated reporting endeavor, and I approach this situation with the humility that I am a media reporter at a desk in New York and have not undertaken the difficult work of reporting on the conflict directly.
Still, the Journal’s story has the feeling of a story rushed out the door to match a competitor without fully checking out the facts. Other elements of Journal’s sourcing in the original story itself are confusing. In its 15 mentions of “intelligence” reports in its story, only once does it say the reports were circulated by Israel (and not on first mention). The generous read of that decision is poor editing. The ungenerous read is obfuscation or puffing up sources.
The story also illustrates how news orgs can be incredibly resistant to backing down from anything they publish. At a time when news outlets are under financial and political pressure, many organizations feel that it is even more important to project strength and authority to discourage critics from challenging their reporters and picking apart their work. It’s understandable why the Journal continues to stand behind its story, but it could incur costs to its credibility.
An earlier version of this story mistakenly stated that the US pulled funding for UNRWA after the Journal’s story; it had pulled funding before the story was published.